Writing an animation score for a friend of a friend

I'm writing a little score on ukelele for an animation film to a brief. It's fun. Hopefully Matt will help me record it later.

Cinema Museum

Tonight it's Lydia Pappas's birthday party which she's holding at the Cinema Museum in Dugard Way. I have to dress up 1940s style and I'm going to sing some Doodlebug Alley songs with my ukulele.

Spy! Bathing Beauties ...

Off to meet Mitch now to record 'The Spy' cannot wait. I'm going to take my uke. Debs is showing me her tracings of the bathing beauties that she painted for a client. She is brilliant at transforming spaces with paint finishes. She knows so much about art and techniques. But she destroys all her artwork. We are complicated people, us artists. Or rather, people are complicated. And artists certainly are.

Nunc dimittis

I have been writing a little mediaeval sounding tune, singing in thirds and fourths in harmony with single notes on the ukulele.

I wanted to put some simple Latin to it, so I chose the 'Nunc Dimittis' but I'm most disappointed with the last line, 'gentium, et gloriam plebis tuae Israel' which makes a distinction between the gentiles and the people of Israel so I will cut those words out.

As a poet whose first collection will contain material written about certain stories from the Middle East about the ongoing conflict and occupation I feel that I can't afford to be lax in regards to this kind of expression.

At the same time I recognise the great emotional power in liturgial lyric. I note that I am repeatedly drawn to Latin as a language for singing.

Folkwit Festival

I'm off to Nottingham to play in the Folkwit Festival tomorrow.

I'm playing at The Orange Tree in the evening with The Big I Am, my ukulele friends from Liverpool - I love this band.

http://www.myspace.com/folkwit

Rehearsal with Andy Gordon

Andy arrived promptly as usual and we settled down for a lovely rehearsal. It was such a beautiful evening that soon we took our beer into the garden and had a little chat about life, the universe and how we both love walking in the evening and at night.

We accidentally pulled off a lovely version of 'She Moved through the Fair' and followed it up with a rather mixed jam on the mixolydian mode. Both Andy and I get a bit fret-confused as we are more used to jamming on guitar than bouzouki and/or ukulele. Still we started to make some progress, and I found myself recalling some approaches from the days when I played African guitar with Folo Graaf from Sierra Leone. Funny how things can come back to you when you are not expecting them, and connections arise between different parts of your artistic life. It feels a little way to go yet, but perhaps we'll make some instrumental bouzouki and ukulele pieces to join the songs ...

Andy was particularly tickled to see that I had got a review for Doodlebug Alley in the County Times, Powys. Apparently he knows the guy who did the article - a chap called Barry. He even knows where he sits in his local pub, and is looking forward to having a chat with him about it. It was a nice review, so it shouldn't be the start of any alehouse fisticuffs.

We finished off with our version of Lord Randall. Our version seems to really be about the relationship between Lord Randall and his mother! Dialogue is such fun to sing, especially when you do both voices yourself. He's come out rather falsetto whereas his insistent mother is deeper and delivers her questions with a sinister gravitas.

These long summer evenings are blissful. Have to make the most of them.